Touring Rallies

TOURING RALLIES

From Daytona to Sturgis, Motorcyclists are on the Road to Fun.

One popular motorcylist image is the Rugged Individualist. He’s the guy who looks like the hero of a Marlboro ad. Or an aftershave commercial. He’s riding a motorcycle, a big motorcycle, down some long, lonesome highway oblivious to the lures of designer jeans or decaffeinated coffee. To him, a social function would be a flash of the headlight for a motorcyclist coming the other way.

This image fits easily with V-Twin motorcycles, visits through small towns, and hazy recollection of Richard Boone’s most famous character.

As much as the Lone Ranger appeals to us as a motorcycling image, motorcyclists aren’t, for the most part, anti-social. If anything, motorcycling is a social function. Cyclists gather for Sunday rides, poker runs, rides to watch races or weeklong celebrations of two-wheeled fun. Enough motorcyclists coming up with the same idea of fun can create an Event, and there are lots of motorcycle events each year. Enough, in fact, that if a motorcyclist wanted to hop on a big street bike and ride from event to event around the country, he could keep busy the entire year.

No sooner does the year begin than the Crotona Motorcycle Club of Crotona, New York stages the Crotona Midnight Run. This run has been held for a couple of generations now, and the entrants still get pins cast from the original mold. The whole point of the Crotona Midnight Run is to provide a challenge for motorcyclists, and that challenge comes from the weather.

New York, we in California are told, is cold in the wintertime. So cold that there’s ice on the pavement and snow in the air much of the time. Perfect conditions for hearty motorcyclists. Those hearty bikers depart for a tour of the countryside, leaving the starting line at midnight. Their run lasts most of the night, following a marked route, keeping the bikes upright on the icy roads while trying not to freeze.

Maybe hand-to-hand combat with hypothermia isn’t your idea of fun. In that case there are less demanding events for bikers.

Some events are distinguished by their sheer magnitude. Like Daytona. Daytona Beach is a resort town on the coast of Florida. It's also home to the biggest biking bash in the country.

It begins the second week of March every year and lasts for a week. Originally Daytona was the site of one big race, held on the beach, where the bikes raced on the sand. But it also occurred at the end of winter when motorcyclists were ready to ride somewhere. Daytona is where they went.

Now Bike Week begins a week before the big race. During that week there are a series of races, flat tracks, short tracks, motocross, enduro and smaller road races. Finally, on Sunday, there’s the 200 mi. road race held at Daytona International Speedway.

Besides the racing are the other events. Things like road tours, motorcycle equipment shows, swap meet, sand drags, the Rat's Hole chopper show; or just riding up and down on the beach.

Riding around the streets of Daytona Beach during Bike Week is a lot like looking at the world's largest Harley-Davidson collection. Besides the Harley-Davidson show and the Rat’s Hole bike judging competition, there are an incredible number of Harleys just being ridden around in Daytona. Recognizing that, HarleyDavidson sponsors a number of activities at Daytona, including a poker run, a parade to the race track on Sunday morning and a kick starting competition. Harley also sponsors the series of dirt track races the week before the Daytona 200.

While an event like Daytona attracts a large number of bikers, an even larger number of motorcyclists can be found at the hundreds of local events scattered around the country all year long.

Finding a local poker run, for instance, is not always easy. Small motorcycle clubs can't afford to advertise their events much, so notice goes to club members or may be put up on a motorcycle dealer’s bulletin board or wall. If you're interested in finding a local run. there are other places to check for notices. Any place that motorcyclists frequent, w hether it’s a local tavern or cafe, may have an announcement of upcoming events. Other motorcyclists in your town may know' of club events.

There are a couple of other sources of information about touring events worth noting. Road Rider Magazine publishes a monthly list of touring events submitted by the readers. That’s probably the most complete list of touring events available. Some motorcycle dealers sell Road Rider, or you can get it from Road Rider, P.O. Box 678, South Laguna, Calif. 92677. It’s not available on newsstands. Another publication that lists some road events is Cycle News, a weekly publication available in both an east coast and west coast edition. Like Road Rider, it can be found in motorcycle dealers.

Most of the local events are held by AMA-sanctioned clubs. These clubs are organized in 40 geographic districts. Joining the AMA (RO. Box 141, Westerville, Ohio 43081) gets you monthly issues of American Motorcyclist, the AMA publication. It lists a calendar of AMA events, including road riding and competition events.

Most of the road riding events held by local clubs are poker runs. In these, motorcyclists will follow a marked route, stopping at several spots along the way to pick up a card handed out by the organizers. When everyone has completed the route, the rider with the best poker hand of cards is the winner. All good, clean fun. And a way to see some new country or just ride along with other bikers from your area.

Sometimes motorcycle clubs will create a different version of the poker run. It might be just a limed run, following spots on the pavement. Or instead of cards, pieces of paper with numbers or letters might be passed out, the numbers or letters later matching up with cards on a scoreboard just to make sure nobody has that unfair advantage.

In the last few years there’s been lots of interest in long-distance rides now that most motorcycles are able to run long distances with little or no maintenance. These are things like the California 1000 or the Texas 1000. Most of the long distance runs put either 500 or 1000 miles into a day or two, running bikers along scenic routes. The challenge of long distance runs used to be whether the motorcycles would last. Now the bikes have taken away lots of the difficulty and the biggest challenge is to stay awake.

Probably the granddaddy of long distance rides is the Three Flags Classic. This event goes back to a time when most of the roads around the country were unpaved. At that time half a century ago motorcyclists and car drivers would occasionally compete against the clock in cross-country dashes. Men like Cannonball Baker would try for a straight-through run from coast to coast, or sometimes from Mexico to Canada in what became the Three Flags Classic.

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This has changed in this day of interstate highways and grown men hiding behind trees with radar guns waiting to ambush unsuspecting riders. Today’s Three Flags Classic is vastly different from the original run. It’s no longer a race. It’s an endurance event. And the organizers, the British Columbia Road Riders and the Southern California Motorcycle Association have organized delays in the checkpoints between Tijuana and Canada so that riders must stop along the way. That’s done to prohibit riders from setting new speed records on the run with the help of giant gas tanks, radar detectors and sixpacks of No-Doze. There is a time limit for the ride.

Depending on the route chosen by riders, the ride takes most riders about 65 hours of the three days allowed. As in the past six years, the Three Flags is again held during the Fabor Day weekend, Sept.

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5 to 7 this year. Entries are limited for this 1600 mi. run, so anyone interested should contact the Three Flags Classic, P.O. Box 82285, Burnaby, British Columbia, V5C 2N2 as soon as possible for arrangements.

A different kind of long distance riding event is the Grand Tour. Organized by different groups around the country, these tours may be run during a six month period. Riders entered in a Grand Tour are given a collection of spots to visit during the next several months and earn trophies or pins for visiting all the checkpoints on the list.

Grand Tours are great for discovering scenic or historic spots in a state where you’d never know they exist.

Some of the more active touring events are held by various marque clubs. The most active have been the BMW clubs, which hold annual rallies that attract thousands of BMW riders. More recently the owners of other brands of motorcycles have been gathering for national rallies, too. And even one accessory manufacturer has gotten into the act now that the Vetter Corp. sponsors the Vetter Rally each year.

Besides the normal rides to nearby scenic spots, the national brand rallies may have technical presentations, entertainment, camping, barbeques and field meets.

Field meets include motorcycle skill events like a slow race, in which riders try to cross a parking lot in the most amount of time without putting their feet down. Or there might be a bite-the-weenie competition where riders ride past a hotdog on a string, trying to bite it while riding past on their bikes. Barrel races are sometimes held, where riders try to push a barrel across a field with their motorcycles. And with gasoline getting more and more expensive more of the rallies are staging economy runs. At a couple of economy runs held last year the winners were riding over one liter machines and getting over 100 mpg.

While the brand rallies are announced in some of the touring publications, the best source of information about club national rallies is from the clubs themselves, and a complete list of national clubs was printed in the March, 1981 Cycle World.

Other clubs besides motorcycle make groups hold national rallies and have fun doing it, too. There’s the Retreads, a group of over-40 motorcyclists who have both regional and national get togethers. Both the United Sidecar Association and the Third Wheel hold gatherings for the threewheeled set. Professional motorcyclists> like the Blue Knights and Motorcycling Doctors and Motorcycling Attorneys all get together annually, too.

But for most people, a touring rally is like Sturgis or Aspencade. They are the best known of the touring rallies, both occurring near the end of summer in the western part of the country. Yet they are entirely different.

Sturgis is more properly called the Black Hills Classic, a festival built around the AMA flat track races held each year the second week of August. The crowd that attends bears more similarity to that of Daytona than that of Aspencade. Lots of choppers line the main street at Sturgis, South Dakota, and even more are lined up along the highway through Deadwood, just down the road. The races are good and the scenery can be spectacular, but it seems as though most of the crowd is in town to party.

Aspencade, held in Ruidoso, New Mex-< ico the first week of November, is unlike most of the other large touring events because it isn’t descended from a race. Organizer Til Thompson simply decided to organize a touring rally 10 years ago in his home town of Ruidoso, high in the central New Mexico mountains. The scenery is spectacular, and Aspencade occurs after the horse racing season has ended at' Ruidoso Downs, and before the ski season has begun.

The crowd at Aspencade is different from the other events. Few choppers show up, relative to Daytona or Sturgis. Most of the bikes are full dress touring bikes and the people on them, lots of couples, are, more inclined to wear matching vests and coats than black leather.

Every day for a week riders polish their Gold Wings and XS 1100s for the bike shows held in conjunction with the accessory show. In between bike judging people participate in field meets, or ride to historic spots nearby. Many of the cyclists camp out, though the high elevation makes for low temperatures at night.

The real appeal of something like Aspencade, though, isn’t in the accessory show or the bike judging or organized rides through the mountains. It’s the combination of the long, lonely ride to Ruidoso mixed with the conversation and visiting among friends new and old around dinner or lunch or a picnic in the forest.

It’s a way to exercise a need for both solitude and society. And the motorcycle makes it possible, tempering the mind with long stretches of pavement across the desert or the plains or along the coast.

That’s the secret of the touring events. The pavement and the motorcycle massage the mind as few other things in life can.